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At random
These days, I no sooner lay my head down on the pillow than I'm asleep. But back before my heart attack, and while I was smoking two packs of cigarettes daily, I would lie awake literally for hours, unable to fall asleep. Often, my alarm clock would ring, and I'd stumble out of bed for an 8 a.m. class without having slept a wink..
Rereading some humorous essays by James Thurber the other night reminded me of that unhealthy segment of my life ("segment," my eye; it was damn near half). One in particular, "The Watchers of the Night," brought back to mind the mental gymnastics I used to perform all for the sake of bringing sweet Morpheus to heel. Other readers might think Thurber was just making it all up, but I can swear to the truth of much of it.
"I play a night game called place-to-place, or around -the-world-in-eighty names," Thurber writes.
| "The goal, a hopeless one, is to recall four-score place names [beginning with the same letter] that strike no alarm bells in the memory. I hear none in Punxsutwney, or Papeete, or Irvin Cobb's Paducah, but from there on man and nature have made the going rough. One man, an architect and artist, says he starts with the town of Azusa, California, and moves eastward, a town and a letter of the alphabet at a time, hoping to doze off before he reaches Zanesville, Ohio." |
| Oh, sure, Jim! |
True, the above doesn't sound quite right. (And if it were, Thurber would soon have ended up in the loony-bin, his mind twice as jumpy as before.)
But I used to play a game, or, more accurately, a drill or exercise, that made me feel, in retrospect, like a forerunner of Adrian Monk, the compulsive TV detective, or Jack Nicholson, the obsessive fruitcake romance writer in the movie As Good as it Gets.
I would try to spell various words backwards: smut spelled backwards, for example, is TUMS; gnip-gnop spelled backwards is ping-pong. The longest word I ever tried to achieve without pen and paper was petsnicitsale, which is elastic instep spelled backwards.
| This I know because for years my family had a reproduction of pages from the Sears catalogue on the downstairs bathroom walls. Sitting there waiting for sleepiness to come, I spelled backward every single word on the page. Some I committed to memory, and so, to this day, if I'm in the Kansas City airport and say to my daughter, who has been away from home now for more than a decade, "petsnicitsale!" she won't bat an eyelash before recalling proudly, the across the length of the American Airlines counter … Elastic instep!" |
Another compulsive game I used to play was to lie on my back in bed, alternate between left and right big toes (tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick), so that the last letter of the word I'd chosen would come on the left toe. (The fact that I no longer have a real right toe wouldn't make any real difference in this game; a fake toe would do just as well.)
A variation on that game is to start climbing a flight of steps and see if you can't, somehow, reach the top with your right foot.
Finally, I sometimes stumble across a palinode, a little-known word that denotes a word that makes sense spelled backwards (so little known, in fact, that my word processor underlines it in red), but that's an entirely different story.
Growing up, I used to suspect I was the only person in the world afflicted by these strange compulsions.
And that, I guess, is why I value the example of James Thurber.
The two of us, plus Jack Nicholson, make a party of three, and if three is a crowd, and if there are three of us who feel the obsession to step on cracks in the sidewalk while walking down the street, then we can‚t all be nutty.
| Can we? |
Are there mental games out there that I'm not aware of?